Travels with Children... and Linc

"On such a trip as mine, so much there is to see and to think about that event and thought set down as they occurred would roil and stir like a slow-cooking minestrone. There are map people whose joy is to lavish more attention on the sheets of colored paper than on the colored land rolling by. ...It is not so with me. I was born lost and take no pleasure in being found, nor much identification from shapes which symbolize continents and states." ~ Travels with Charley in Search of America">Travels with Charlie (John Steinbeck)

I am not generally a fan of Steinbeck, a fact I blame on being forced to read 'The Red Pony (Twentieth-Century Classics) at much too young an age, but I make an exception for his book, 'Travels with Charlie.' Perhaps that is because this book is a travel narrative, a genre of which I am very fond. (I love 'Blue Highways: A Journey into America by Least Heat Moon) I am never bored of the amazing sites, the beauty and the stark ugliness that one sees. And I was reminded anew of the startling diversity that characterizes this country on my most recent road trip with my two sons.

We had driven, me, my husband, our two sons (10 and 6) and our Doberman, Lincoln, from Washington through Oregon, Nevada and into Arizona. The plan (and as Steinbeck comments 'We find after years of struggle that we do not take a trip; a trip takes us. ...The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it.') was to travel at a leisurely pace, stopping at various 'dinosaur' sites along the way. The start went fairly well -- we drove from Washington to Oregon's 'John Day Fossil Beds'.  Those, it turns out, are far more extensive than I ever imagined. Where we ended up was... curious. Incredibly hot, to my mind, for Oregon and the rock formations were fascinating.